


Messy Break

by Neriad13



Series: Delta's Heart Saga [3]
Category: BioShock 1 & 2 (Video Games)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Child Abuse, Forced Bonding, Gen, Isolation, Parenthood, Psychological Horror, Psychology of a Big Daddy, Trust Issues, you can say a lot with whale sounds actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29824713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neriad13/pseuds/Neriad13
Summary: Imagine knowing that the one and only relationship in your life was synthesized in a test tube. Imagine resenting that child whom you are unable to stop loving with a love that you know to be false.So when the heck did it go and become real?
Relationships: Eleanor Lamb & Subject Delta
Series: Delta's Heart Saga [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2000584
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Messy Break

The loneliness had become less of an open wound and more of a badly-healed scar. It ached, but it was an old, deep, almost comforting ache that the one they’d designated Delta no longer had the imagination to live without. Its existence was as familiar as the rattle of the orderlies’ cart outside his door and as constant as the pressure that bore down on the walls of Rapture so subtly that its inhabitants never guessed that they were being crushed. 

Nothing bothered him anymore. Not the way the labcoats’ looks glided over him, never once meeting his eyes, nor the sharpness of their orders, nor the thought of what might happen, should he fail them in some hitherto-unknown way. There was a shell around his heart as thick as the one they’d put on his body. 

Both shells brought with them a sort of contentment. Nobody could touch him now. Not a thing that happened could possibly harm him. 

He leaned back against the featureless wall of the room they’d shuffled him into and hummed at a lower frequency than the human ear was capable of perceiving. He couldn’t hear it himself. But he knew he was doing it by the way the vibrations rippled pleasingly through his chest. Since he’d discovered the ability, he’d started doing it all the time. He could sing without anyone threatening to switch off his voicebox. He could cry without anyone chiding him for being a baby about whatever new and ever more painful thing they were doing to him. It was a secret voice, one that they couldn’t take away as easily as they had the last.

The hum died away in his throat. The nothing that was happening continued to happen. 

It was perhaps the third or fourth room that he had any memory of being in. One wall was lined with a long silver mirror from behind which he could occasionally see shapes moving. The single door was plain as the walls. The floor was hard and cold. Comparatively speaking, it was on the more spacious end of his idea of a room. 

Not that the additional space was doing him much good. A pair of industrial-strength chains trailed from the manacles on his wrists and terminated at a pair of equally industrial loops expertly welded to a panel in the floor. He had enough slack to move around a little and lift his arms to chest height, but standing up was out of the question. 

Not that it mattered. There was not a thing in this world that mattered anymore. 

The door opened. A faint murmur of activity could be heard from the other side. Delta didn’t even turn to look.

“-eady to pull her if it tries anything.” a voice said.

“Yeah, yeah.” another voice answered from somewhere further from the door. “Standing by with the shepherd's crook.”

Then, from the first voice, in a sweeter tone: “Go on.”

The door clicked shut. It was quiet again.

Something had entered. 

He hadn’t looked. He hadn’t budged an inch. But he could feel the presence as clearly as he felt his own hands or feet. Its soft hands touched the shell around his heart, probing for weakness, testing its strength. It found a crack and a finger entered.

Delta reacted with a surge of terror the likes of which surpassed the combined might of every single waking nightmare he had any memory of living through. He roared loud enough to be threatened with having his voicebox switched off ten times over. He thrashed at his chains. He scooched as far away as he could and _pulled_. 

How strong was he, really? He’d never had a chance to find out. “Be _gentle_ , Delta.” they’d always told him. “Like handling cotton candy. You know what cotton candy is, right? And don’t move so suddenly. It’s all cotton candy. Every bit of it. You can’t go out if you’re not _gentle_. You want to go out someday, right?” 

A human game with human rules. But what could he do when he _tried_?

The panel rattled in the floor. He jerked at it again and again, huffing with metallic frustration, straining every single muscle in his upper body. It budged no further. 

He fell to his hands and knees and uttered one last, pathetic rumbling cry.

When he looked up, the girl was standing there, a quizzical look on her pasty face. The confusion radiated off of her in waves, each more nauseating than the last. She took another step, drawing closer. Delta flinched, rattling his chains.

“Hello.” she said, her face shifting into the smile of a child who has spotted her favorite toy in the chest. “I’m six.”

She held up seven fingers.

“Or...seven?” she mumbled, examining her hands with a look of mild distress. 

The moment passed. Her smile came back. Her eyes glowed golden. Resignedly, Delta sat up, wincing at the daggers of joy she was nonchalantly chipping away at his crumbling shell with.

“I bet you’re real old.” she went on. “Daddies are supposed to be, right? I _think_.”

With a few little steps, she cleared the last bit of physical distance between them. Delta froze. She was almost touching his knees. Squinting, she stood on her tiptoes and peered through the window of his helmet.

“I wouldn’t know.” she said sadly. “But…”

She dropped back down. Her sorrow sliced through the last shards of his shell like a gleaming silver scalpel. It _hurt_ to feel it. It hurt so much, after feeling nothing for so long.

To his great relief, she brightened again.

“I’m glad you’re here now. Want to go out and play?”

She wrapped her tiny hands around the tips of his fingers and tugged him towards the door. The chain stopped her short. She looked at it as if she’d only just seen it, her disappointment throbbing like a wound in his head. Delta let out a sad, low tone. 

She dropped his hand and wandered back, her eyes filled with tears. Minutes ago, he hadn’t cared that he was chained up. He _remembered_ feeling that way so clearly. He remembered believing that he could bear it and anything else that came his way forever. 

But now he wanted nothing more than to go out and play with this girl. It seemed so cruel to introduce her to the playmate she’d so clearly been longing for only to snatch him back at the last second. He gestured an offer to pick her up. She wiped her nose on her filthy pinafore and lifted her arms up in reply. 

She fit in the crook of his elbow as though it had been designed for her. With a contented sigh, she nuzzled up against his chest.

He was so happy.

And so filled with dread.

-

Getting attached to things gets them taken away.

Depending on others will never end well.

Expectation of disappointment mitigates pain.

Caring is weakness.

It had all been so _simple_ , before, when there had been nothing left to lose. He’d been at peace with his fate. He could have accepted anything that came his way. He could have endured whatever was thrown at him.

Except _that_. 

He loved her. And he _hated_ that he did. 

Somehow, they’d found a way to strip him of the last shred of defense against the world he had. Her joy pricked him like a thousand tiny needles. Her sorrow opened up the hole in his heart that he’d spent so long and at such great cost to close. Whenever she smiled at him, it was like a knife through the ribs. 

He was going to lose her. Not now, perhaps, but in time. She would grow up and leave him. She would get lost in her maze of tunnels and never come out. _They_ would take her away for no other reason but to spite him. 

He _couldn’t_ get attached. But he was unable to stop himself, no matter how hard and often he tried. He told himself that he hated her. He tried to feel gladness when she was gone to her hidey hole, relief when she was no longer his problem. But all he really felt was the ache of her absence. All he could do in the minutes between other jobs was stare at the hole and mourn. 

At first, he hadn’t understood. It had all felt so natural. Questioning their relationship was not even a thing he could conceive of doing. 

But over time, he picked away at the larger question with smaller ones. 

What is her name?

Where had she come from?

What did she _like_ , outside of angels and ADAM?

What did he really know about her at all?

It was all artificial. Their relationship meant nothing. The love he felt when he saw her poke her head out of the hidey hole after hours away was an illusion conjured by whatever the labcoats had done to him. 

And yet, for all the deducing it had taken to get that far, the thought of _not_ loving her still seemed an abomination of unfathomable horror. _How_ could they do this to him? _Why_ had they _forced_ him to care, if they were only going to take her away in the end?

His love was as strong as the ocean was deep, but beneath it ran a riptide of resentment.

-

“Brbrbrbrbrb!” the girl said, blowing air through her vibrating lips.

She giggled, bouncing on her heels and looked up at Delta expectantly. Delta stared back, thoroughly confused. This was a new one. He could normally parse the strange little games she came up with, but here, he was drawing a blank.

“ _Brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrb!_ ” she repeated, more insistently.

“Raaaaaaaaah?” he asked.

“No!” she said, her frustration jabbing at his brain like the baton of a private police officer. “ _Brbrbrbrb_. Like before.”

Before? What had he been doing before? Not much. He’d been walking, thinking, scanning the area disinterestedly for probable threats. 

Wait.

He’d been humming the tone too low to hear. It was something he did out of habit now, hardly realizing he was doing it. It helped him think. It was something to do when boredom hit. 

She could _hear_ him?

Experimentally, he tried it on purpose.

The girl’s face broke into a wide, satisfied smile.

“Brbrbrbrb!” she answered back. 

He did it again. She bounced excitedly, raising her arms to be picked up. When he obliged, she stuck her ear against the part of his helmet that concealed the location of his throat. He hummed a song that only she could hear as he strolled along and - just for a moment - forgot that they were nothing to one another.

-

It was one of those days when the riptide was almost strong enough to carry Delta away. Nothing in particular had triggered it. His moods were like the phases of the moon. They went in a clockwork cycle of not caring if the sole relationship he had was fake and all the way back to very much giving a damn that his life was a lie that he had no choice but to live through.

Today was the New Moon of Despair. 

He knew it wasn’t the girl’s fault. The mystery of her origin aside, there was no possible way she’d asked for it either. There were so many children who weren’t like her. Had she been one of them once? With a family, a home, a person who cared enough to switch out her clothes when they got dirty? Had to be.

But he was what she had now. He had a responsibility to do right by her, whether he liked it or not.

When he was in a mood, he took pains to never, ever allow her to see his frustration. He took it out on other things instead. He savored the pain of the splicers who stood in his way. He delighted in the rare treat of the robot that had once flown into the arc of his swing by accident. It never helped. But sometimes, he just couldn’t stop it. 

There were no splicers or wayward robots where they were today. It was a quiet residential neighborhood, the presence of life revealed only by the occasional eye peering out at them from behind the blinds. 

The girl’s stomach rumbled. She made a sour face and kicked a piece of trash down the sidewalk. She needed a place with more gang violence. Or a morgue. Nobody ever went hungry in a morgue. 

But there was a formal rotation dictating who was and wasn’t on morgue duty. If Delta so much as set foot in a morgue, the other girl’s protector would certainly take issue with that. There was no camaraderie between Protectors. Each of them was too wrapped up in the well being of their own girls to dare let an outsider get in her way. 

Delta was the same way. Sometimes, when it was late and quiet and he was alone on the ocean floor, half-assedly patching up some crack in the city’s infrastructure, he thought he could recall the feeling of having comrades. The realization that there wasn’t a whole lot anyone could do, should the protectors band together and take the city for their own would creep up on him, filling him with an ecstasy he’d long thought forgotten. Why _couldn’t_ they work together? Who could possibly stand against them, should they put their minds to it? In the dead of night, with no one to look after and no one to argue the merits of such a plan, it seemed so simple.

Come morning, the idea would be instantly obliterated by the rush of joy and jealousy and protectiveness that surged through his system every time his girl crawled back into his life. No matter how hard he tried to hold onto his own desires, he was not capable of caring for anyone except her. None of them were.

Perhaps he could win, if it came down to a fight over morgue duty. Part of him wanted to try. Part of him longed to smash someone else’s porthole, tear through someone else’s suit, if it meant that his girl was going to eat tonight. 

But the labs generally frowned on that. If he killed another protector, they’d take her away. They _couldn’t_ take her away. The dread of losing her, perversely, was enough to overpower the instinct to have her fed her at all costs. 

He lumbered along behind, the fog of her frustration clouding his own stormy mind. 

At one point, she stumbled upon a dead cat. It was a filthy thing, all skin and bones and buzzing with flies. How it had died was not immediately obvious. It looked, for all intents and purposes, as though it had keeled over in the middle of the sidewalk for no reason at all. 

The girl squatted down and poked at it with her syringe. 

“Carrrrrrrgh.” Delta said. “Drrrrrruuurr.”

_Cat. Dirty._

She hadn’t understood. He couldn’t have come up with anyone who _would_ have gotten it, to be frank. 

She continued to poke at the cat, jabbing its mangy hide full of neat little holes, the sorrow and frustration inside of her growing almost too much to bear.

“I’m nobody.” she whispered, stabbing the cat with every repetition of the word. “Nobody, nobody, nobody…”

She was hurting. His every instinct was screaming at him to _stop_ the hurting, but how to do that when it was coming from _inside_ her? It wasn’t a problem he could bash away at until it was dead. But there had to be _something_. 

He made a low, mournful sound and rested his hand on her back. 

She turned around and slapped it away.

It was such a tiny slap. He hadn’t even felt it through his glove. Suffering worse blows on a daily basis was his job. 

But the emotional force behind it rammed into him like a speeding train. He pulled his hand back in shock and stood there, reeling at the sheer amount of hatred that had been behind that tiny slap. 

She was all he had in the world and she was _rejecting_ him. 

The anger he felt at being inextricably forced to care about this child he knew nothing about broke free and surged to the surface. He growled, low and cold. She ignored him completely. 

Unacceptable. _He_ was the authority figure here and _she_ was going to do what she was told. They were _leaving_ , now. 

He grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. She squirmed under his grip, beating him with her other, tiny fist. He pulled the syringe out of the cat with his other hand and attached it to his belt. Fine. She could have her temper tantrum on the way to the next neighborhood over. Perhaps she’d go back to normal if she got it out of her system. 

She ground her heels in when he tried to tug her along. She grabbed hold of every stationary object they passed - a newspaper rack, a lamppost, the railing of an apartment building’s front step. His frustration rose just a little higher every single time he had to stop to pry her loose. His patience was wearing thin and his movements, becoming a bit more brusque. 

“I _hate_ you, Daddy!” she shrieked, grabbing hold of one more thing behind him. 

Her anger was like a kick in the side to an already injured animal. He growled, low in his throat and jerked her forward.

The _pop_ of the joint of her shoulder freeing itself from its socket stopped everything. 

And then the tidal wave of her shock, her pain, her realization of what had happened came crashing down. She was screaming inside his head, screaming outside of it. He was roaring with the force of their combined psychic pain - the mess of betrayal, the hurt, the _wrongness_ of it all.

He was on his knees and she was running full speed at a vent. He moaned an apology and scrambled after her, the throbbing in his head blurring his vision and slowing his movements. He slammed into the wall and thrust his arm as far as it would go into the vent. His hand scraped nothing but empty walls.

He roared in frustration, slamming his body against the wall again and again, beating at the inside of the vent until he felt it bend under his fist. And then he moaned, sinking to the ground.

She was gone.

She was out there somewhere, hurt, alone and far beyond his clumsy reach. He didn’t _deserve_ to reach her. He didn’t deserve to see her ever again. She was cotton candy and he was the ogre who had torn it to shreds.

But she had no one else. She was _his_ responsibility and he did not have the option of giving up. 

He rose to his feet with a determined grunt, closed his eyes and listened for her. Not with his ears, the limited things. They couldn’t even hear the full range of his own vocalizations. He shut out all else and listened with his mind, his heart. Far away, a faint, flickering little ball of rage and hurt scrambled through the darkness between walls. 

His eyes snapped open. He sped around to the other side of the wall, following the path of the vent as it wove through the ceiling above. People looked at him oddly as he dashed through the halls, plowing through whatever stood in his way. He barrelled through a restaurant's veranda, his eyes seeing nothing but the pathway she’d come through overhead. He stomped on a tricycle without stopping and paid no attention to the child left crying about it on the curb. At one point, the vent vanished into the side of someone’s home and seeing no other way around, he’d smashed straight through the wall and out the other side, leaving the dazed occupant far behind, in the dust of the plaster wall. 

Sometimes he lost the scent. His panic rising, he’d come to a dead halt in the middle of wherever he’d been and stand stock-still, scanning desperately for the faintest hint of her. A few times, he thought he’d lost her for good and was almost dragged down by the resulting despair. But then he’d catch a dim whiff of sadness or a passing taste of anger and go tearing down the direction he’d sensed it from like a monster more terrible than him was on his heels.

His rampage ended in a maintenance tunnel lit with low, red lights. The intensity of her hurt filled the narrow passage like a foul miasma. He moved slowly, wading through the morass of her sorrow, being pushed this way and that by the waves of her confusion.

The tap from which it all spilled out lay behind the rusty cover of an air intake vent on the wall. From inside, with his physical ears, he could hear crying.

“Daddy’s _good_.” a small, tremulous voice sobbed. “Daddy’s _good_ , Daddy’s _guh-h-h-ood_.”

Delta sank down to the floor, the weight of her emotion too much to bear. He wanted nothing more than to tear the cover off the vent, drag her out and never let go. But it wouldn’t work. He’d only hurt her again. 

He wished he could talk. He wished he could say something that she would understand. 

Left with no other recourse, he moaned pathetically.

The crying stopped.

“N-No…” the voice whispered. “Nu-uh...n-no…”

The vent creaked. In his mind’s eye, Delta could see the faint flame of her tiny body creeping backwards into the darkness. She was leaving him. She was never coming back. There wasn’t any way he could make this right.

 _Stupid_ voicebox. Why hadn’t they given him one with words? Why did they have to break him open and make him _care_ so damn much?

Except there’d been times when it hadn’t been _them_ making him care. The obligation to spare her feelings was something he’d imposed on himself. The worry he’d felt when she was stabbing the cat - that hadn’t all been due to his own discomfort. 

The moment he realized that she could understand a part of him that he’d never thought anyone would. 

He closed his eyes and hummed. The sensation of time passing melted away. The tunnel, the vent and everything that he’d thought stood between them ceased to exist. The only things that mattered were the rumble in his chest and the glow of her presence.

Something crashed noisily to the floor beside him. His eyes snapped open. The hum died in his throat. 

It was the vent cover. A pair of golden eyes peered out at him from the hole in the wall. 

“ _Brbrbrbrb_.” she said softly, scooching out a little farther and holding out one of her arms to be picked up.

He touched her as though she were spun of sugar, as though she could be dissolved by the moisture in the air, her structure shattered under the slightest pressure. Beneath his helmet, he winced at the sight of her right arm flopping uselessly by her side. 

He hummed as he carried her back to the lab, with each note saying _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…_

**Author's Note:**

> \- I imagine the people watching Delta freak out on the other side of the one way mirror were “SHIT. FUCK. Get her out of there!!! Now!!!!” But then Gil was like “Wait! Don’t you see? He’s violently rejecting her! That is the _opposite_ of disinterest! Let us observe them a moment longer before pulling the plug.”
> 
> \- Say, whatever happened to that guy whose [apartment Delta steamrolled through](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18769144)?


End file.
